I got an email today claiming that the Bible contains the cure for diabetes.
It’s a detailed look at one of one of the most controversial passages in the entire Bible.
Its meaning has been studied and examined for thousands of years, but recently, scientists have linked this passage with something no one could have imagined.
In a shocking twist, researchers may be looking to the Bible to cure one of our deadliest diseases.
Thanks to a misunderstood phrase buried on Page 1,117 of the King James Bible… people from across the country are miraculously curing themselves of diabetes…
Sometimes in as little as 3 days!
Atheists hate this… but they can’t refute it.
It contains a link to a website that is going to tell you all about it, which I’m not going to share. It’s one of those hideous spam sites that fires up a video lecture at you with no controls, no way to skip through it, and that drones on and on about how wonderful this cure is — I’ve got it running in the background, and so far, ten minutes in, it has said nothing about the “cure”, except that it works miraculously, and lists a bunch of doctors’ names in testimonials. I’m about to give it up, but we get a few hints.
The secret is supposed to be contained in Daniel 3 (that page 1117 nonsense is just ridiculous). That is the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego, who were thrown into a blazing, fiery furnace by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, and survived. I do not recommend treating diabetes by setting people on fire.
Oh, I just heard the video complaining about Big Pharma and citing Joseph Mercola. Still no word about what the fuck Daniel’s Diabetic Miracle
might be.
Ah. A phrase: intermittent hypercaloric feeding
. No, that’s not in Daniel 3. I’m gonna guess it’s going to be something about hot foods or high energy foods or something similar, which won’t work.
The narrator just announced that all you have to do is write to him and he’ll send you your free copy of a brochure that will describe how you can easily cure your type 2 diabetes. Implication being that there is a non-free description of all the details.
I’m done. I can guess where this is going to lead. If you suffer through this tedious presentation, you must be really gullible, so you’ll happily pay some sum of cash to this quack to get his super secret magic recipe which must be true because it is in the Bible.
I guess I’m stupid enough to listen to 15 minutes of endless promises and grandiose claims, but not quite that stupid.
To be fair, chucking people into furnaces would cure their diabetes, but the side effects kind of overwhelm the benefits.
“Hypercaloric feeding”? And “intermittently” so? Yeah, that’ll do wonders for the patients’ blood sugar levels. There’s no way that could result in hypo- and/or hyperglycemia.
” one of our deadliest diseases”
Diabetes isn’t in the Top 5 of deadly diseases. It is in the top 10, but it ranks after tuberculosis (1.34 million TB deaths to 1.26 million diabetes deaths). Heart disease and cerebrovascular disease are significantly more deadly – 7.25 and 6.15 million, accounting for nearly 1/4 of deaths from disease combined. (Source: http://www.who.int/features/qa/18/en/ )
I’m very, very tired of people talking about diabetes like its a death sentence and that it’s automatic if you’re fat. “You’re fat so you’ll get diabetes and die!” It’s neither. And PS, thin people with or without diabetes are gonna die too!
Hmmm. The secret could be gathering the satraps, or listening to the psaltery, or that the young men wore turbans. Over in 1 Daniel is a bit about these same young men insisting on being fed vegetables. There’s also the fact that the names by which we know them are Babylonian – Abed-Nego is really Azariah.
Wait PZ. Technically, incinerating a diabetic will end their diabetes.
The 10 minute intro with no facts, only a claim how wonderful the stuff works, must be by design. I came across that a while ago with somebody advertizing some sort of stock market system that “works every time”; also promised the info was for free, but never came to what it was. I gave up about 10 minutes in.
Maybe they try selecting for the gullible or they want to create an emotional investment with the listener (like “I invested 20 minutes of my time, I can spend a few minutes more – or a few bucks – so it would not have been in vain”)
*reads Daniel 3*
I wonder if it’s being cut in pieces and making your house a dunghill?
A friend of mine has worked as a top-notch pastry chef for most of his adult life. Surprise, he was diagnosed with diabetes in his late 30’s. His response was to start watching his diet like his life depended on it, (which it does of course) and work out a lot! He shed 60 lbs, and now, at 50, is healthier and more fit than many guys half his age. Not surprisingly, the “miracle cure” for diabetes involves a lot of hard work and discipline. It would be great if there were a magic bullet that would eliminate it entirely, but there ain’t.
I wish the bible offered us Type 1’s this kind of miracle cure.
Just for grins, I looked into one of the “cure” claims for type 2 diabetes touted by an ex-child actor, and found a link to the Mayo Clinic diet/exercise plan, and the magic ingredient, cinnamon. Then checked out the active ingredient in cinnamon. No supporting claims, as one would expect.
Reminds me of a spiel I got from a former classmate once. When both he and the video demonstration about this ‘great opportunity’ had managed to go on for over twenty minutes without actually mentioning the name of the company involved, I got suspicious.
Sure enough, it was Amway.
Yea well, that’s basically the ads on this page: two make millions videos, one super secret granny wrinkle cure, a military flashlight ad and then two bridal/athlete totally surprising underskirt vulvic photo galleries (?I know, right? Don’t worry thought, the pages these link to just point to more millionaire ads).
I actually listened through one of those stupid vids a few years ago and they were basically just: “give me money and I’ll promise you paradise!”. So it’s not surprising to see them add Bibles into the mix: that’s the scam Christianity has been working for millenia.
drst@3: by far the main way diabetes (types 1 and 2, but not so much gestational) kills people is via its effects on blood vessels. So you can’t quite easily compare heart disease and stroke against diabetes: diabetes causes a good fraction of heart disease and stroke.
But your name and email address are gold to them (and to you). If you send that information to them, you are guaranteed to get more spam, thus providing you with more material for blog posts.
drst@3: I don’t know, my wife was denied life insurance because she was a diabetic. Do actuaries know something that you don’t? :/
More seriously (although, I was serious about life insurance being denied for diabetes), my father died from vascular dementia, secondary to diabetes and hypertension. Glycatio end products can and do cause vascular damage.
It’s not a death sentence if one keeps one’s glucose and blood pressure under control, but without controlling them, things can go sideways really nastily.
As for the insurance company, it was part of my benefits package through work. It’s a shame that they haven’t consulted an actuary since the latter half of the 20th century, why we have treatments for diabetes now!
I think that’s exactly it. If you ask questions like “how is this supposed to work?” or “whats the evidence?” you’re simply not their target audience. They’re looking for people who are either too gullible to notice the warning signs or desperate enough to ignore them.
Keeping one’s blood sugar levels under control is hard; throw in any mental health issue, or dementia, or poverty, or generally any obstacles, and it quickly becomes nigh-impossible.
We probably took a few weeks off my grandfather’s life by doing a two-week road trip around Kentucky: it threw him off his routine. He died a few years later when various nerves gave up and he progressively lost control of his muscles — very likely a consequence of diabetes. (No regrets, obviously: grandkids, do spend a few weeks bonding with your grandparents, it makes them happy and you end up with unforgettable memories!)
It seems to be a diet, basically, one that depends greatly on fasting. There is a whole fucktonne of nothing here:
Well, they were right. Atheists *can’t* refute it. You weren’t able to at least.
@3 drst
I suspect that when they say “our” deadliest diseases they mean something U.S. centric. Diabetes is 7th on that list, and TB goes far, far lower. Of course, there’s also the small matter of how cancer jumps way up the list, and how on a percent of deaths distribution diabetes moves from about 2.2% globally from your data to 2.9% globally from what I found here*. It’s big, but tends to be overstated a bit, particularly given that even if diabetes was entirely limited to overweight people it still needs an incident rate at least 10 times higher for “you’ll get diabetes and die if fat” to become credible.
Also, while I didn’t find a convenient list with more recent data, I can say that HIV has moved down a bit, and TB has moved up.
*http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/282929.php?page=2
Unfortunately unproven fasting diets aren’t just being promoted by scammers. I was shocked to find a brochure for the unproved HCG Weight Loss Program in my own doctor’s waiting room a couple of years ago. It combines HCG hormone injections with weeks of a very low calorie diet — as low as 500-800 calories per day. At least you’re under medical supervision while your calorie intake is dangerously low, but that’s about it.
http://www.wisemanfamilypractice.com/portfolio/weight-loss/
He’s actually been a pretty good doctor to me over the years, though a nurse practitioner there once gave me some sketchy advice about food types that my gastroenterologist quickly dismissed as completely bogus, and he’s always heavily promoted various hormone treatments for various conditions. Since finding the HCG Brochure I’ve been thinking it’s time to move on to a more evidence-based family doctor.
The video is the cure. After listening to it for N minutes, an amount which depends on the individual, you’ll want to throw yourself into the incinerator. Doing so would, as others have noted, cure the diabetes, with the useful side-effect of ending the torture-by-droning-video.
The amount of time, N, is probably inversely proportional something like one’s IQ… Or, similar to what others have suggested, perhaps a logarithmic relationship to one’s gullibility…
Meanwhile, back in the real world:
Type 1 diabetes ‘prevention’ trial starts in Scotland
I just read a second article about that trial. They’re prescribing metformin, under the beta cell stress theory.
Apparently, the theory is that the person’s beta cells are under severe stress to produce insulin and somehow the immune system then attacks the beta cells.
I’m a lot dubious about the theory, but that’s why there are studies, to prove or disprove theories.
They found a “cure” for diabetes and the important thing is that they can now gloat about atheists? The milk of human kindness…
Woozy:
It’s difficult to refute something when there’s a refusal to say what it is in the first place. Anyroad, it is easy to refute, because the whole damn thing is nothing but fasting, and that’s already been refuted all over the place.
Tacitus, not saying you shouldn’t change doctor, but just be aware that some people sneak reading material in doctor’s surgeries and hospitals. (You know, the sort of people who think unsolicited proselytising is doing a favour to others.)
I’ve seen creationist magazines turn up in one of my waiting rooms. I’ve seen pamphlets from JWs or Seventh Day Adventists or Mormons (i can’t recall which) scattered all around a hospital one day — apparently some nong thought it was a good idea to essentially spread litter through a hospital just in case it might convert a random sick person. I routinely get unsolicited mail sent to my clinic from the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, which is just a front for Scientology. And some magazine distributors will sell cheap bundles of old magazines (which are not always suitable for the clinic but a receptionist could very easily plonk on the magazine rack without noticing).
The long, unskippable, hollow video is that way for the same reason why 419 spam is poorly written – it’s a way of screening out all but the most vulnerable. Anybody who would be doubtful about the product being sold at the end would have long since lost the patience to sit through the video – so the spammers only have to deal with the people who are most likely to be receptive to their message.
Sending spam is cheap, in terms of time and money. Responding to emails is expensive.
A neat paper on the subject is here: Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are from Nigeria, from Microsoft Research.
What’s with the bible page number? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone quote bible passages by page number, for obvious reasons. When I see someone using the bible to sell stuff, I think “affinity scam”, but here wouldn’t Christians think “no True Christian would quote that way”?
Is that True Christian like a True Scotsman? ;)
Parse@28: awesome paper, thanks!
On a related note, I’ve discovered that passages in the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster contain a cure for pink eye. Anti-pasta atheists hate this… but they can’t refute it. And I’ll happily share it with the masses for the low cost of $29.95 (sample: it involves hitting yourself with a ball-peen hammer while singing Hakuna Matata).
And the Lord said: “Truly I am the way, and I have come to teach thee.”
And verily a man in the crowd said, “Lord, my fields are no longer as fruitful as they once were. My brother, Levi tells me I should plant my fields with clover and let them lie fallow one season in ten. Is there not a better way to rotate them.”
And the Lord said: “You’re not ready for that level of technology.”
And the man said: “I think I could handle that.”
And to the Lord’s great relief another woman interrupted them and said: “Lord, I have been afflicted with leprosy for three years now. Could you not teach me of a substance that I might extract from a mushroom, or bread mold that might cure me.”
And the Lord said: “You’re not read for that technology.”
And the woman said: “I think I could handle it.”
Thus the Lord said: “Allow me to lay hands upon you, and I shall cure you.”
And the woman said: “That’s how I got it in the first place.”
I wonder who developed the “templates” for these things and teaches people to use them – the fomat, and language structures are always too similar for it to be a coincidence
@numerobis @ 13 – I can’t vouch for exactly how the WHO breaks up its stats but I’m assuming diabetic-related strokes are included in the “diabetes” category on their ranking not in the other category, but without seeing the data, I can’t say for sure.
@wzrd1 @15 – I got denied health insurance because I had an ovarian cyst. Denying medical insurance due to pre-existing conditions was commonplace before the ACA and they used any medical condition, including severe acne, to do it.
The bottom line is people who die of diabetes have a strong correlation of also being poor. Managing diabetes to keep it from becoming life threatening requires access to regular medical care, which is difficult to impossible the poorer a person is. As with basically every medical condition, the real underlying killer is poverty and the resultant lack of access to healthcare that comes with it.
The Bible contains a pretty decent bread recipe, so it wouldn’t be implausible if it contained references to ancient folk remedies for some condition or other that are reasonably effective and that modern science can now explain. And if it did, why would that be a problem for atheists?
Not with successful results from phase 3 clinical trails. I’m not holding my breath.
The Bible’s “bread recipe” consists of what basically amounts to “throw these grains and seeds into a bowl and mash them up”. It’s not even clear that we know what all of the grains and seeds in question are. I don’t think it’s a good idea to use this as “evidence” that the Bible can be trusted when it comes to medical remedies. Unless making a drink out of floor sweepings and giving it to a woman whose husband is a jealous bastard to see if her lady parts dry up and she develops peritoneal ascites is your idea of medicine.
Maybe I was unclear. I don’t think there is evidence that the Bible can be trusted for medical remedies. My only point is that the Bible, like many old books, could contain some reference to some folk remedy that was reasonably efficacious and that science can now explain, and that if that were true it would be no big deal. Many old folk remedies have some scientific basis we can understand now but our ancestors did not then. They knew only that they seemed to help. This is a perfectly ordinary secular phenomenon, and if such a remedy is described somewhere in the Bible, there would be nothing unusual, surprising, or divine about it — hence, no problem for atheists.